Survivor: Cook Islands, 9/21 recap: Everyone Says I Love You

I have a confession to make. I love you. Yes, I know, we’ve only just met last week. We exchanged glances across the recap before both skittering off shyly to other threads. But it was love at first sight for me, and I know you feel the same, despite the way you looked vaguely over my head like you’d possibly seen something interesting on another site. It’s ok. I know we have a rapport. I know you feel the same way I do. So while I pine for you, I wrote another recap. To show my love.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Chicken Overlords

Last week we saw the tribes divided by race, and Sekou got sent home for getting all “I’m the man, I make the decisions” with the women of Hiki tribe. We rejoin the action at Hiki the morning after tribal council. Having gotten rid of Sekou, the remaining four realize they’d damn well better figure out how to start a fire. They’ve got a flint, they’ve got kindling, but they aren’t having much luck. “I don’t understand what we’re doing wrong,” Stephannie says. I don’t really either, so there’s not a lot of suspense I can add here. Eventually Rebecca gets a coconut husk lit, and yells, “Guys! It’s lit! What do we do now?” Um, add some wood, maybe? Nate jumps around yelling in celebration. He says he knew the women would step up “and be tough sisters” and that’s just what they’ve done.

Over at Aitu, they’re fishing, and doing well – they’ve got some fish, some crabs, some clams. No starvation here. Cristina tells the tribe she’s a cop and describes how she nearly lost her arm from a gunshot wound. Meanwhile, some wild chickens appear. I thought at first they were the chickens the Raro tribe lost, but I guess the islands are just …. populated by wild chickens. Who knew? Perhaps the chickens are the descendents of some master breed of chickens that once owned the islands. I guess they needn’t have had all that fuss about taking chickens off the ship and stealing chickens and whatnot. They do have to catch these wild ones, though, a process that’s harder than you’d think. Chickens might have brains no larger than your thumb, but they zig-zag remarkably well.

So to catch them, Ozzy decides to rig up a net. Cristina, though, has her own ideas about how this should work. Ozzy says he’s trying not to shoot down all her stupid ideas, but apparently he doesn’t hide his “I know better than you” attitude, because Cristina tells us Ozzy is bossy. “Every idea has to be his idea,” she says.

Ozzy says he and Cristina just don’t click – he thinks it’s because she’s a cop and because of the age difference. Yes, Ozzy – she’s a grownup and you’re a young punk.

Anyway, they do catch a chicken, and Ozzy says he feels comfortable with his standing in the tribe.

Roofs Are, Like, For Losers

Meanwhile, Puka is trying to catch chickens too – they’ve rigged up a box on a stick. It works – two chickens wander under the box, someone yanks a string, and the box falls. There’s a name for this kind of trap, I’m just too tired to think of it right now. Anyway, apparently Yul thought this one up. And Yul and Becky are bonding – they’re both Korean, she says, which is a bond, and she views him like an older brother. Don’t box yourself in as a friend, honey, he’s cute!

Raro, the team that started with two chickens, now has no chickens, and apparently their camp is not in the middle of wild chicken territory, because I don’t see any. They do get Jonathan, though, who returns from Exile Island to hugs. He says it was terrible there, and that he didn’t find the idol.

But Jonathan isn’t much happier with what he comes home to – he says his tribe mates haven’t done a thing while he was gone, and they still have no real shelter. So he starts directing them to build a floor for the shelter. Jessica immediately hops to, and tells us that it was Jonathan and HER who “decided to pick up the speed.” She says the others are wasting time.

Apparently the pretty group has decided that building a real shelter is dumb. And by that, I mean the cute-but-apparently-stupid blond boy, Adam, has decided it’s dumb, and the two fawning girls sit and look at him adoringly. “We didn’t decide anything as a group,” Adam says. “I don’t want to waste energy on something to look good.” He thinks a shelter is for looks? I could see that if Jonathan said, “Hey, let’s build a catapult” or something. But a shelter is, you know, kind of necessary. Dumbass. I wonder how he’ll like it when it pours rain some night? Because hey, a roof is just for looks, right?

Anyway, Adam tries to get his little girl cronies on his side by asking what they want to do. But they say they’ve already started on the shelter so they might as well. Jonathan says Adam is hungry and crabby and doesn’t understand that other people might have other priorities. And Candice whispers to Adam to be careful.

You Will Feed My Lazy Ass, And You Will Like It

Let’s go back to Aitu. Because cocky Ozzy is only part of the problem over there. Billy is the other part. We see everyone fishing, and Billy asleep. He says he’s “trying to conserve my energy” (for what?) and thinks it’s stupid to waste time doing something he doesn’t know anything about. He says he’ll let them fish, and he’ll help eat. *sigh* Don’t these people WATCH Survivor? Even if they get recruited from their male model/waiter gigs in L.A., why don’t they rent a past season and get a feel for the sociological rules that play out EVERY DAMN SEASON? Because the lazy person ALWAYS gets the boot. Always. It is a rule of human interaction, both on desert islands and off, that when a bunch of people work and one person sits on their ass, that one person gets hated. Contribute or die. Billy has drawn a target on his back – or would have, if he wasn’t too lazy to actually draw.

Ozzy asks him to go do something with the chicken net, and Billy sullenly gets up from his comfy stump and lumbers around the trees for a while. Ozzy says it’s hard when people aren’t pulling their weight, and it’s tiring to keep telling Billy what to do. Later, the tribe works on building a floor for their shelter, and while Ozzy totes big bamboo poles, Billy drags some leaves around.

The girls try to talk to Billy about this. He says he just doesn’t feel like he fits in with the tribe. “Metal is my culture,” he says, rather than Hispanic culture. Honestly, I haven’t noticed a whole hell of a lot of bonding over race in Aitu – not like in Puka – and I don’t think Billy would fit in with any tribe unless that tribe all sat on their asses, too. The girls feel like Billy doesn’t jump in and try to participate, and they want him to feel like a part of the group.

So, Two Rabbis Walk Into a Bar in Saigon…

At Puka, Jenny gets a headache, and has Cao Boi work on her the way he did to whichever boy that was last week, pulling out the “bad wind” and leaving a red mark on her forehead. She says she doesn’t like the mark, but her headache is gone.

Cao Boi is getting more irritating to the rest of the tribe, though. In their shelter that night, his ethnic jokes piss everyone else off. They ask him to stop, pointing out that it makes them all look bad. Cao Boi, however, says they just need to learn to laugh at themselves. “I don’t worry about what other people think,” he says. Again, Survivor 101 – you HAVE to worry about what other people think, when they can’t get away from your offensive and (more importantly) not even funny, ass.

How To Win By Losing

Back at Aitu, Billy’s snoring is keeping everyone else up. They start discussing a bold and, in my opinion, utterly stupid plan – throw the next challenge so as to vote Billy out. Ozzy and JP are the proponents of this plan – they say Billy is dead weight and they’ll be better off without him. “We might as well cut our losses now,” Ozzy says. The girls don’t like it, however. Cristina says she’s not sure she can trust Ozzy now.

Everyone gets the treemail describing a reward/immunity challenge that involves belts and ropes. Nate says Hiki has to win this one, as they can’t afford to lose another member.

At the challenge, Jeff says he’s going to read them a brief story about Captain Cook. Then they’ll be tied together, and have to move that way through a series of poles and over a rope bridge, picking up plaques to answer questions about the Cook story at the end. The reward is two tarps for the winning team, and immunity for the top three teams.

Since Hiki is down one member, the other tribes must sit one person out. Billy tries to insist he should sit out, and he’d be absolutely right if his tribe were actually trying to win. But since they’re not, he’s overruled and they sit out JP.

Jeff reads out the story, and then tells them it’s written down in a book in front of them. They can stop to read it, but it might cost them time. Naturally, Aitu decides to slowly read it, while the other teams shoot off to start working through the challenge. I feel sorry for the rest of the tribes, trying so hard to win, not knowing that Aitu would practically walk backwards to avoid winning this.

Anyway, Puka and Raro both finish their puzzles at the same time and jump on their mats. Jeff declares Puka the winner, even while Jessica is yelling that Raro got to their mat first. Hiki finally gets done, and Billy falls off the rope bridge anyway, and Aitu loses, as they meant to do.

Jeff says that Puka and Raro actually tied, so he gives tarps to both of them. Aitu chooses to send Yul to Exile Island. And that brings us to the beginning of one of the most bizarre things ever on Survivor. Most of it comes later. But Candice is standing with her tribe, next to Billy with his tribe. She tells him that she feels bad for Aitu, and Billy whispers back that he’s next. In what is clearly not a heartfelt declaration of personal feeling, but instead just your average “girl trying to make someone feel better” statement, Candice says, “Aw, we love you!” Billy replies, “I love you.” And then has this weird shy smile on his face, while she looks oblivious. No one else really notices this at the time, but it’ll be important later. Important, and hilarious.

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

I’ll hurry up and get Yul’s visit to Exile Island out of the way. He gets there, he reads the clue to the immunity idol – something about forming a letter with the mast and blocking out another island – and digs a really deep hole, and finds it! He’s very excited.

Back at camp, the members of Aitu talk about what they did. “Billy dug his own hole by not working,” Ozzy says, adding that a lack of work ethic demonstrates a lack of commitment to the tribe.

Cristina says Ozzy is conniving and she sees him trying to control things later. Or, how about now?

And Billy says his situation is bleak, and he just hopes he can find an opening to try to save himself.

The others say Billy is walking around looking like a zombie. Cecelia says she feels bad for him, but JP says he doesn’t. Billy apparently has realized they threw the challenge, and says he doesn’t even want to be there anymore. He does get Cristina aside, though, and argues that she’ll be the next target after he’s gone. Cristina agrees that she doesn’t trust Ozzy, and that she thinks he’s more of a threat than anyone else. She goes to talk to Cecelia.

I’m not really sure what Cecelia tells her, it’s all very vague. Something about how she doesn’t have a deal with Ozzy and that she’s with Cristina, but I can’t make out whether they agree to vote off Billy or not.

But Ozzy says he knew Billy would stir stuff up. He’s irked that Billy is “going behind my back.” Whoa, there, pardner. Going behind YOUR back? Who died and made you king? Cristina is right, you know – this little punk thinks he’s running the show, and if they don’t stop letting him, he’ll run them all off the island.

Anyway, Ozzy says he thinks Cristina is the one most open to Billy’s pleas, and that they might even conspire against him, the great Oz. But that would be stupid, Ozzy thinks. “They’re going to suffer really bad” if they kick him off, he says humbly.

Words Cannot Describe the Hilarity

This is a lot of dragging out when we all know pretty much what’s going to happen. But thank goodness, we’re finally at tribal council. Jeff asks if a leader has emerged in the tribe, and Billy says Ozzy emerged as “the big voice.” Cristina says Ozzy “tries to take control of certain things.” But Ozzy, cognizant at least that the person appearing as a leader often gets the boot, claims he’s not the leader of anything, he just leads on stuff he knows how to do.

Jeff then asks why they lost. Billy tells him they did it on purpose to get rid of him. Jeff is surprised, but JP admits they decided they were ready to lose someone who doesn’t carry his own weight. Billy claims he “fell into a classic trap” but JP argues he’s not a victim, he’s just lazy.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for Survivor Christmas. If you didn’t actually see this, I regret that I cannot do justice to the utter weirdness that I’m about to describe. Are you ready for it? Billy says it’s ok, because he’s already gotten his reward from the game – love.

“I fell in love in this game,” Billy says. “I fell in love at first sight. Her name is Candice.”

From Jeff to every Survivor-watching home across the country, jaws drop. And I think, friends, we are all collectively thinking the same thing: is Billy on crack?!

Oh. Oh god. Must stop laughing. Poor Billy. Surely he’s hiding his head in shame somewhere right now. What was he thinking? Jeff turns to the other tribe members and asks what they think of this romance. Ozzy says he didn’t notice anything. JP says he thinks Billy is shady and sketchy and this declaration is just random. Cristina says she feels “very leery for Billy” and doesn’t want him to get hurt. I, for one, wish they’d drag Candice in here and have her hear this. At the least, I can’t wait for the reunion show.

Anyway, it’s time for the vote, and Ozzy gets one vote to Billy’s three, so Billy’s out. No surprise, although I don’t know whether Cristina voted for Billy or Ozzy. Billy does some sort of deathmetal hand-gesture/wave, and is gone. Jeff sends the rest of Aitu back to camp with the warning that they still are going to have trust issues.

Next week:

Someone catches a squid, Parvati flirts with Adam – setting up yet another romantic difficulty for Candice – and Cao Boi gets even more obnoxious, if possible.